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Penthouse emperor Bob Guccione, who died in 2010, made his fortune from the skin trade. Now former assistant Jane Homlish wants to prove he was more than just a smut peddler. Photo: Getty Images

Jane Homlish (Christian Johnston)

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Sitting in front of a computer monitor in a warehouse in Englewood, NJ, Jane Homlish is examining a screen full of thumbnail shots of artfully lit naked women. She’s been here daily for several months, sifting through a massive archive of materials belonging to the late Bob Guccione, the legendary publisher of Penthouse magazine.

For Homlish, it’s an emotional experience. Now 62, she spent more than three decades as Guccione’s right hand, beginning the day she met him in 1971, when she was a 21-year-old former Catholic school girl from Monmouth County, NJ.

She was with him during the high-flying years when Guccione ruled a media empire from an opulent, 45-room double townhouse on East 67th Street.

And she was with him when his empire crumbled under a mountain of debt, the house’s lush appointments were carted off by creditors and Guccione was ravaged by the cancer that felled him in 2010.

“It was an amazing journey we took together,” she says.

And now she’s reliving that journey, sifting through and cataloging a vast archive of Guccione’s personal belongings, including photographs, correspondence, journals, manuscripts, illustrations and other items he meticulously kept during his lifetime.

The collection also contains dozens of oil paintings and hundreds of sketches by the Brooklyn-born skin magnate, who started out as a visual artist before launching Penthouse with a small bank loan in 1965.

It’s all been acquired by a New Jersey entrepreneur, Jeremy Frommer, who’s spent the past year amassing the archive, following a chance find of some of Guccione’s belongings in a storage locker, and plans to spin the collection into movie and book deals, gallery exhibitions, an image library and scores of other projects.

Three months ago Frommer hired Homlish to help him sift through it all, along with a team that includes estate curator Simeon Lipman and several full-time employees.

Their shared goal: To rebrand the image of a man they say is unfairly derided as a chain-draped smut peddler.

The Guccione they want to evoke is a painter and chess grandmaster who sketched relentlessly, wrote science fiction and published the science magazine Omni for 17 years; the one who commissioned work by top artists, published writers from Philip Roth to Isaac Asimov and printed muckraking stories on subjects from the plight of Vietnam veterans to prison reform.

“I’m so glad this is all coming to light, because he really was a genuine artist,” says Homlish, referencing her former boss’ eye for detail, his “genius” IQ, the Impressionist influence on his photography. “It’s an opportunity to show Bob as he really was; the genuine person that was underneath everything.”

By the time Homlish met Guccione in 1971, he’d traveled an unlikely career arc. Raised in Bergenfield, NJ, Guccione considered the priesthood, but instead became an artist. He spent years traveling in Europe and North Africa, painting and working subsistence jobs.

He married and settled in London, where after working as a cartoonist and editor of small newspaper, he launched Penthouse in 1965, working on a shoestring budget and doing the photography himself, in a shadowy, soft-focus style that became the magazine’s trademark. More decadent and daring than Playboy, it was an instant success, and four years later Guccione followed with an American version that became a sensation.

All the notoriety aside, Homlish had never seen the magazine when she came to work for Guccione in 1971. A college dropout who had spent months traveling through Europe and Asia on “a bit of a spiritual journey,” she’d applied at an employment agency after coming to stay with a friend in New York City. They sent her to Penthouse to work as a receptionist.

Told she’d be working for a reclusive, brilliant man she might never meet, and learning Guccione was an artist, she was deeply curious, and her first day there, when Guccione called in to speak to someone in the office, she asked if she could meet him. He dodged the query, but later sent word that she should to come the next day to the Drake Hotel, where he was living temporarily.

When they met, there was no small talk: “His first question was, ‘Do you believe in God?’ ” recalls Homlish. “It was so many profound questions, and we spoke about our travels, this journey we were both on. I was insatiably curious, as was Bob. We just meshed.”

She started as his assistant the next day, and for the next three decades, the two were together virtually around the clock. Homlish arranged his schedule, sat in on his meetings, managed his household, screened people who sought an audience with the boss. And she worked side by side with Guccione — an insomniac who often worked until dawn, after days filled with meetings — as he assembled the magazine, slaving over design, over every caption and cover line.

Meticulous and driven, Guccione also had “a great sense of humor,” says Homlish. “We’d laugh ourselves silly writing witty cover lines and going through the cartoons, sometimes rewriting the gags.”

While he was known for picking every shot for every pictorial, Guccione trusted some of the work to Homlish, knowing she “could see things through his eye,” she says.

“Nobody would ever think a woman would be doing this, but I ended up pre-editing the photos for all the layouts in the magazine,” says Homlish, who knew what Guccione wanted: shots that made the viewer feel like a voyeur.

Instead of models smiling at the camera, “it had to look like the girls were enjoying their own sexuality — like you were looking on at something that was private,” she says. “He used to say in the animal kingdom that’s how it is: The male is the voyeur and the female is the exhibitionist who’s doing the dance.”

While many assumed that Guccione’s mansion — which he rarely left, never visiting the office — must have been a nonstop orgy, the truth was drastically different. A homebody who loved to cook, Guccione was private to the point of being “almost antisocial,” says Homlish.

While celebs like Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra occasionally came for dinner, Guccione favored the company of scientists, writers and other intellects, says Homlish. And while models occasionally stayed there during shoots, they weren’t allowed to go out at night, and if they went swimming in the Roman-style indoor pool, a bathing suit was mandatory.

“The girls were as shocked as anyone that it was so quiet,” says Homlish, who, warm and sincere, comes across as no libertine herself. “He wasn’t having parties, running around in pajamas. We used to call his room the black hole because he’d disappear in there and work.”

Homlish stayed with Guccione up until the end — and that part of the journey wasn’t pretty. Changing times that sapped circulation and a run of bad investments, drained a once vast fortune. Under a mountain of debt, he lost everything: his magazine, his company, his home. Then there was the cancer that left him ravaged and feeding through a stomach tube.

“It was really a very ugly, very traumatic time — the fall of the Roman Empire,” says Homlish, who recalls having to take the Picassos and Renoirs off the wall to be sold at auction. “To see it all go down in flames was so sad, so emotional.”

His house gone, Guccione eventually moved to Texas, the home state of his fourth wife. Unlike previous wives, she resented Homlish’s closeness with Guccione, and Homlish, who missed him terribly but “didn’t want Bob to feel the slightest bit tense or anxious,” largely steered clear.

“That I was able to go to his burial was some closure for me,” she says. “I was the only person outside the family that went, so at least I got to say goodbye.”

By that time, Homlish had a job managing a shop in Jersey that buys and sells gold and silver, and was working with horses, helping out a breeder and trainer. When she got the call from Frommer — who kept finding notes sent between Homlish and Guccione while going through his materials, and tracked her through a documentarian working on a film about Guccione — she was thrilled at the chance to contribute.

“When I learned that Jeremy had this material there was a chance to breathe again,” she says. “It’s renewed my hope that Bob would be appreciated by the next generation and not go down in flames.”

Guccione’s bare assets

Jeremy Frommer and his business partner Rick Schwartz have amassed a vast Guccione archive. Among the highlights:

• Sixty-six of Guccione’s original oil paintings, completed before he stopped painting in the late 1960s, when Penthouse took off.

• A copy of the mailing list Guccione used to promote the March 1965 debut issue of Penthouse by sending announcements to London’s most prominent citizens. (It lead to a fine for mailing indecent materials.)

• Pre-stardom photos and negatives of Madonna, Lauren Hutton and Miss America Vanessa Williams. They include 23 unpublished shots of Madonna and 12 of Lauren Hutton.

• Every slide for every Penthouse shoot he took from 1971 to 1991 — plus notes on each Pet. (For example, “Leslie is always well groomed and reliable.”)